Tuesday, November 23, 2010

We have a Blue-fronted Amazonian parrot named George who's been a part of our family for thirty years. George sheds his feathers, one at at a time, and we save them and give them away.

I give them to children at my storytelling events. At the Book Fair -- in the schools and at the storytelling tent -- George's feathers were a hit. I asked a question, and for a good answer, the listener got a good luck feather.

One small boy got a feather for dancing. I asked him to come up on stage and make some SSzzounds with me and he declined, so I drummed and he started dancing a nice little rhythmic dance. He was rocking, softly shuffling his feet to the drumbeat. For a while, he just hung, floating like a bee. I don't think he knew the entire audience was cheering him on. He got a nice feather for that!

My grandson and grand-daughter came up on stage, too -- that's Taj you see in the snapshot. He would've been on stage the whole time if I'd let him. Anais has never come up with me before and she surprised me by making a great growl into the mic. I asked her if she'd do another one. Her eyes drifted upward to the top of the tent. Then her eyes met mine and she said, "No!"

That's kids -- you always get the truth. Like the boy who gave me the hug and said, "Thanks for the stories" and the other boy who scowled at me and said, "Get away old man." But he got a feather too. Why not, George wouldn't want it any other way.

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

We have been on the road for ten days. Sacramento, San Francisco and Sonoma. First, the writing workshop in Sacramento where we met some fine writers, enjoyed the company of Alice and Jim Carney and the whole Carney family -- wonders all! -- and saw, on Halloween night a small white angel toddle up the walkway while her mother, a large woman with a booming voice chanted, "C'mon Mama, C'mon Mama" and the barely bobbling youngster teeters up the walk with hands scribbling in the air, grasping for candy. Of all the costumes and pranksters, this is the best. But, then, it's no costume, it's just magic.

Next morning, an email from my old and dear friend Fred Burstein, reading coach extraordinaire, poet, woodsman, carver, builder, man of big shoulders and wide interests, well, this fabulous Fred sends us a poem from one of his students, Jennifer, and it goes like this:

Over Halloween we were walking backto Grandpa's, and a cat started following us.We walked up to a different person.We asked if this was her cat.She said, No, but she does know that cat.His name is Heath. The cat stayed outon my grandpa's porch, and Grandma Lillbrang the cat inside, and fed it.And now Grandpa is angry causehe don't want to be responsiblefor the cat, that's why.

____

The whistler is one of those gifts you sometimes encounter when you wake up at 3 AM. We were in San Francisco on Nob Hill in Jim and Alice's guest suite which was the kind of place Jack London might've written a story in, and I was lying in bed thinking that life is sometimes so magical you can't put it into words, and right then, this whistler comes along and I try to get it down --

A solitary whistler, part swallow, part sparrowtoodling between the tides of trafficand suddenly the traffic quits, disappearsthe whistler wanders on, whistlinga person with no name, no face, no listenerin the whole sleeping city but me.

___

And then, this morning, a daft raccoon staring into the sunlight with whiskers long as broom straws. Sitting there, staring out of dark eyes, winking in the sun, saying: "I have every right to be here, the people feed me and I waddle around and look at things and take my time as I please." The dog next door ignores the raccoon, and when we pass by again, a half hour later, the masked fellow is sitting in a flower pot, as if he's a furry flower planted there. So life goes -- magic!

Friday, October 22, 2010

The stories in THE AMERICAN STORYBAG are a fleeting yet incisive look atAmerican life, primarily on the road, but sometimes on or in the water, and have beencollected by Gerald Hausman since 1965. Some of the tales are very brief and may becalled "sudden stories". Many of them deal with human survival - an autistic boy lost in atrackless swamp; a young woman who falls in love with a supernatural creature; a youngman who finds himself by finding his horse. Some of the tales are mere messages left ona cell phone. Others, like the story Bimini Blue tell about a Navajo healing ceremonygiven to a famous author who committed suicide. There are stories of ghosts, demons,fearsome predators, and wise old men who take the innocent in hand and lead them onthe road to wisdom. These are tales of innocence and anguish, fantasy and fable, humorand heart. In them we hear the voices of a lost America - an America of folk heroes fadingfast from view and crying out to be heard.

The Reviews

"Not since Mark Twain has a writer presented classic American storytelling
so honestly. Hausman is at his best with this collection, truly entertaining."

- Hilary Hemingway, author of Hemingway in Cuba, on The American Storybag

"...it [Tunkashila] is like the wind one hears on the plains, steady, running,
full of music."

Saturday, October 16, 2010

I recorded Native American Animal Stories in 1988 with jazz musician Ray Griffin in Tacoma, Washington.

In these gather-around-the-fire tales, we learn how Nuthatch sprinkled dust and the people's hair grew white, and there was such a thing as old age. Old Man Gopher brought toothache into the world. The people's teeth were white as white corn, but Gopher visited them and then they had toothaches. Horse, we learn, is a slow-footed fellow. But he becomes fast when Butterfly brings him the fast flints from Flint Mountain. These are the stories that tell us not just how it goes but why it goes. These are for sharing, healing, and just plain smiling.

I began writing the stories in The Turquoise Horse in 1974 in Tesuque, New Mexico.

The idea didn't come from my imagination. It came from my friend Jay DeGroat. In 1965 Jay told me about a mysterious pinto horse that he had spent months tracking and trying to get a rope around. but the horse always got away. And then he told me about the five horses of the sun. One for each color of the day and the night. The turquoise horse was a midday horse, blue as the sky at that time of day. The dark horse was a nighthorse and stars shone in his mane.

The story goes --

I sit upon a turquoise horseat the opening of the sky . . .My horse walks on terrifying hoovesand stands on the upper circle of the rainbowwith a sunbeam in his mouth for a bridle.My horse circles all the people of the earth.Today I ride on his broad back and he is mine,tomorrow he will belong to another.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

In 1985 jazz musician Ray Griffin and I tried recording this audio book in Abiqui, New Mexico. We were in a canyon and there was a great echo there. But Echo stole the stories. If it had been Rainbow, the colorful one, it might have been different. But Echo is a loud person and very possessive of sound.

Where do we record this? Ray asked.

We tried various places -- his studio and another backroom studio of a friend of my brother's. The recordings did not come out well. Finally, Ray was visiting our house in Tesuque, and he went into the downstairs bathroom. This was in the deepest part of the passive solar house, buried 22 feet under the earth. Jay DeGroat, my Navajo artist friend, painted a howling coyote on the south wall of the bathroom.

Here, Ray Griffin said, is where we'll record the stories.

Every one was recorded in that holy place, the bathroom, under the ground, in the First World.

For a while in the 1980s the most popular story on this audio book was "Star Car." This story was told to me by Jay DeGroat's father, a medicine man on the Navajo reservation. A tiny automobile that circled the earth as a comet and appeared in the desert as a flare of light. A small man inside the car drove it all around the sandy arroyos. The car was only five inches high. Jay's father also told me about Skinwalkers and how they traveled fast as light, quick as a star car. He drank the coffee I made from boiled coffee beans cooked over a fire in the old way. He was a small man in a big black cowbiy hat. He said a blessing over the house we lived in. Then he went on his way. One of the stories I recorded was begun in 1965 and the ending wasn't told to me until 1990. When I asked Jay (translator of all the stories) why it took so long for his father to tell me about Locust's bow and the arrow that opened up the underworld into the world of light, he said, "Snow on the mountain top." By which he meant two things -- the white hair I now have on my head and the snow on Mount Blanco (Sisnaajini). These are winter stories and that is the traditional time to tell them -- after the first frost. Listen well, you may yet hear the twang of Locust's bow.

Thanks to Ray Griffin for the music and the weird sounds and Kurt Mueller of Speaking-Volumes for bringing these back into circulation. May you both walk on corn pollen path.

Monday, October 11, 2010

This newly released audio from Speaking-Volumes is subtitled Native American Tales of the Spirit. That idea was suggested by a Havasu friend, deep in the heart of the Grand Canyon where the stories were lived, witnessed, seen and heard. I just opened the book to page 77 and found this line -- ". . . she named nine things that she loved: the river, the toads, the wrens, the pebbles, the wolf, the trees, the sun, the canyon, and most of all, the morning." On the next page is a message that I saw posted on the community bulletin board in the village of Havasu: "White people will give up digging for uranium when mother earth's heart stops beating." There are spirits moving in and out of this book and the audio is all the more ambient and other-wordly for Ray Griffin's enchanting music. Cicadas come and go in the desert heat. Owls call. I remember diving underneath Havasu Falls and hearing voices. And hearing the corn-carrying woman whose basket was round in her arms as she walked by our tent. She wasn't a ghost; she was a presence. For as the book tells us -- among the watercress and wild celery, the cattails and watersong, Spirit prevails. Havasu is a place where earth, water and sky meet. A place where you are in the center of all things. Your inner-self expands, floats high above the red rocks with the canyon wren.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

From 1985-1993 our family stayed every summer at Blue Harbour in Castle Garden, Jamaica, 14 miles on the double bendy road, the ziggy ziggy road up from Ocho Rios and a few miles from Port Maria and there it was, the old white block house that was once the home of playwright Noel Coward.

So this is where we spent our summers -- running an excursion camp for teens on the North Coast. A sort of outward bound, journal writing school for which Santa Fe Preparatory School gave us our accreditation. Our students were Anglo, American Indian, Latino and Jamaican. Our teachers were Jamaican.

One year we followed the world of Jamaican drumming. At night we listened to the Pocomania church drummers, with their conga echoes of Africa. Another time, junkanoo drums. Jonkonnu. John Canoe. In the streets -- "dem a loot/dem a shoot/ dem a wail."

I remember a drummer showing us how to rid a house of ghosts by drumming them into the far, flat distance of the Caribbean sea. Sometimes at night the rain on the zinc roof drummed its own tropical riddim and I always thought of Bob Marley: "The rain doesn't fall on one man's house alone." And down with the rain came the almonds off the almond trees. And they drummed too, and you could crack them open and eat them in the morning while the croton leaves glistened with raindrops in the sun.

Or the rhythmic repetition of Burning Spear: "Marcus Garvey words come to pass/Marcus Garvey words come to pass/ can't get no food to eat/can't get no money to spend." You could go and visit him in those days, down in St Ann where he had a little roadside store and eatery.

Drum beats in the hills of St Mary. At night, in the white owl pimento wood, drums. In the day on the concrete jungle streets of Kingston, drums.

In the mind, words and drums, drums and words.

So I began recording the drummers we heard. Some drummed on blackened, bottom-up pots and pans, anything to make riddim. Some drummed burra style on goatskin repeater drums. The repeater, funde, bass. Sometimes a whole bamboo forest clicked to the tune of the island wind. Natural mystic drumming.

Some rapped, ripped, rode upon their words like hill and gully donkey, up hill and down hill, singing all the while. Rushing words like rivers. Grumbling drums like thunder.

A Jamaican zinc fence of sound, one man said.

Word, sound and power, said another.

Iron, Lion Zion, said a third.

As we gathered by the river and collected the songs, stories and poems for DRUM TALK. Being there, listening and playing, talking to people like Bob Marley's old friend, Georgie -- "Georgie would make a fire light/as it was logwood burning through the night."

Of which I'll share with you . . .Drum Talk, just released by Speaking-Volumes.

Thursday, September 23, 2010

It was 45 years ago that Navajo artist Jay DeGroat began telling me Dine creation tales and I started writing them down with the thought of one day making them into a book.

Our first collaboration was printed in Santa Fe and published by David Kherdian of The Giligia Press. The book was called The Shivurrus Plant of Mopant. These were not Navajo stories -- they were poems written by children in a writing workshop that I taught. Jay liked the poems and did illustrations for the book, and it was a good beginning for us.

Over the years, Jay and I did many books but my favorite collaboration is the ancient Navajo healing stories he told about Coyote and Badger and Nuthatch and the other animal people. They all became part of a series of books that Speaking-Volumes has just now re-released. Composer Ray Griffin adds unique sounds and his own brand of high desert jazz, sound effects and the voices of Frog, Toad, Bat and more. Even more than the books I've written, these live recordings bring us to a a place that has been unchanged for thousands of years. Special thanks to the one Jay, three Rays and a Rae, and one Jimmy Blueeyes.

My mom, pictured above, was the original bemailer. She could contact, and be contacted, by friends, family, ghosts, and unborn children. She could predict events that hadn't happened, that were happening, that were going to happen and she seldom knew one from another. Yes, she was psychic. In those days there wasn't email; there was telegraphy, telegrams. That was instantaneous mail in the 1940s. But my mom had a faster form of communication. She would think a thought, I would receive it.

Toward the end of her life she got very good at seeing newspaper headlines before they were in print. Whatever I know, whatever I think I know, I learned from her. She was the original bemailer. If she were here today, she would say -- If you be, you can send bemail. Direct transmission from one to another. God bless her, she was the best. And here is a little tribute to her favorites -- the Pony Express and telepathy.http://www.staythirstymedia.com/201009-049/html/201009-hausman-bemail.html

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

He was sitting behind the coffee-maker one morning, and there he stayed during the day, but at night he climbed the walls and ate whatever he pleased.

One day we drove to the airport and when I opened the trunk of the car, there he was, all big-eyed and smiley faced. He thought he was coming with us and he hopped on my luggage.

I transferred him from the hot trunk of the car to a nearby oak tree. What else was I to do? We were on our way out of town. When we returned, five days later, I climbed the oak tree with a flashlight looking for him. It was late and I attracted a parking lot cop who asked what I was doing.

He had a bigger flashlight and I convinced him to beam around the tree for a while. No luck. Our little friend was gone. We drove home, empty-hearted.

When we arrived home, we opened the trunk, and there sitting on my luggage was our friend, big-eyed and smiley-wily. It was night of course and he hopped on my shoulder and I put him in his safe little spot behind the coffee maker.

He was happy to be home. Late that night I heard him bouncing off the walls and Lorry said, "Good little tree frog."

Gerald Hausman calls himself a "native of the world" after living in so many places in the United States and the West Indies. He spent more than twenty years in New Mexico where many of his American Indian folktales were collected and published. Born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1945, Hausman has been a storyteller almost since birth. His more than 70 books attest to his love of folklore, a passion instilled by his mother who painted the portraits of Native American chiefs. During his thirty-five years as a storyteller, Gerald has entertained children of all ages at such places as The Kennedy Center, Harvard University, St John's College and in schools from one end of the country to the other. Five audio books have come out in recent years and two of Gerald's books have been made into animated and folkloric films. His books have also been translated into a dozen foreign languages.